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Articles & Ideas

Core Issues

Finding and Dealing with Core Events

Important Note: This article was written prior to 2010 and is now outdated. Please use my newest advancement, Optimal EFT. It is more efficient, more powerful and clearly explained in my free e-book, The Unseen Therapist™.  Best wishes, Gary

Hi Everyone,

Complicated cases often require sophisticated EFT approaches and this usually includes getting to Core Events. Finding these can be a challenge, of course, and that is why this article by EFT Master Tania Prince should prove useful to serious students.

Hugs, Gary


By Tania Prince, EFT Master

The following article highlights one of the techniques I find of great benefit in my therapy practice. This technique traces back the feelings the person is experiencing to the underlying core issue. It is incredibly simple to use and also very fast.

I have used a recent case to highlight the use of this technique; the case deals with my trainee’s inability to tap (do EFT) on themselves.

Benefits of Using this Approach 

  • Sometimes clients give a massive amount of information regarding their problem, it can often be difficult to know where to start; this approach provides a simple strategy that is extremely effective. It takes you right to the relevant information.
  • You use the current feeling the client is experiencing, to trace the problem back to where it began. It acts as a strong convincer for sceptical clients, that the current problem is connected to the event you are working on from their past.

Case: Dealing with an Inability to Tap 

This session took place in a live demonstration of EFT at a recent training session, whereby one of the trainees said that she was unable to tap on herself. 

I asked the trainee, “How do you know that you have that problem?”

This is an incredibly useful question to ask as it goes straight to the evidence that the person is using to identify that they have this problem.

She answered: “Well, when I sit down to tap, I just find that I get up and do something else, and it happens all the time”.

“So, what happens when you sit down to tap? What emotions do you feel?”

She replied, “I feel exposed”

I then asked: “Where do you feel that in your body?”

“In my stomach”

I then asked: “How would you describe that feeling in your stomach?”

She replied, “It is a constricted feeling”.

After asking permission to tap on the client I took her hand and tapped on the karate point, whilst I said the following:

“Put your attention on the constricted feeling in your stomach and keep your attention on that  feeling and as you do that go all the way back to the very first time you have ever felt that feeling in your stomach, all the way back. I don’t know what might just pop into your mind, but just go with the first thought” 

(Client’s often dismiss relevant information because they don’t think the event is traumatic enough, however at the time of the event they may have experience very high intensity feelings, it is important to go with whatever pops into their mind)

“What are you aware of?” 

The trainee described an event at the age of fourteen in which she was in a French class at school. Other children in the class were talking; she wasn’t doing anything, but at this point the teacher picked her out and asked her a question. After she answered the teacher corrected her in front of the other students. 

As the trainee recited her story, I kept tapping on the karate points and occasionally the finger points.

The reframe was very simple; I said as I continued to tap for the client, “so the teacher had lost control of the class”. Almost instantly the trainee said, “I didn’t see it that way before”.

Speaking with the trainee afterwards, she said, that when I stated, “so the teacher lost control of the class”, it seemed an exaggerated way to describe the situation, part of her wanted to contest what I said, however another part recognised that there was an element of truth in what I said. Mentally it felt like an, “elastic band being pulled and then relaxed as the thought processes changed”.

She went on further to describe this as the moment that her thinking shifted to realise that it, “wasn’t only me stood up there exposed, he was exposed and was using me as a tool to get the class back on track”. This for the client made the event, “more into a picture than a feeling”; she said she felt “dissociated from it”.

Reframing is a linguistic tool for helping clients shift how they think about the events in their lives. By simply presenting a different view of this event, by saying “so the teacher had lost control of the class”, it caused the client to shift her perspective and look at the event again in a different way. Our issues are created by the meaning we give the events that happen in our lives; by looking at this event again, she gave it a new meaning. Although I used reframing and EFT, it would have been equally possible to just tap through this event and clear it.

Feedback after the Session 

The following is part of an email I received from the trainee a few days after the training. 

“……..Since returning I have now been able to create leaflets and cards, ready to post on notice boards etc, and trust in due course potential clients will contact me.

There seems to be an enormous shift in my thinking and confidence……. A new me………..”

In a conversation that followed the email, she reported that she was now able to tap. She also said, previously what stopped her advertising was that if she did, “people will know me” (in other words, I will be exposed as in “eyes will be upon me”).

When we spoke about other events where she had felt exposed, she said, “I know it happened” and “that was how it was then”. Listening to her words, it was clear that she was using past tense to describe the events and her emotions regarding them. This is a good indication that she is thinking differently about them.

Tania Prince, EFT Master

PS: Thank you to the trainee for the insights and help in putting this article together.

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